2010-07-29

Eye-Fi and Mi-Fi just work

OK, impressed. The Eye-fi cards just work! They start at £50, see www.eye.fi
It's an SD card that goes in the camera and uploads the pictures over wifi.

How the hell do they do that?
(Yes, I am involved in technology and electronics and I am shocked by the size of the thing)

But the good news is that it just works with my EOS 1Ds MkIII and my access points. It also just works with my MiFi so I can take pictures and have them on my web site automatically over cellular 3G just like that.

Down sides are :-
1. It seems to send the pictures via their server. I suspect this can be hacked around.
2. As the camera is unaware of what is happening you don't see any progress/status.
(Though if using the mifi it has a transfer counter on screen that shows it is working)

Clever bits:-
1. Skyhooks geotagging which seems pretty good so far
2. Auto handling of common public hotspots
3. Can configure from a Mac!
4. Endless memory - deleting old uploaded images at a configurable threshold.
5. Fucking small - its an SD card!!!!!!!

So, the fact James managed to break and lose respectively the two Canon WFT-E2's I used to use is less of a problem now. The damn things cost me £700 each and had such a broken IP stack that we had to configure proxy ARP responses on the LAN here to use them. Canon won't be selling any more of them ever again I imagine.

9 comments:

  1. Would love one of these if only they did a CF version.

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  2. I saw a forum saying a CF to SD adapter worked find with it.

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  3. Only some do and only with older Eye-fi cards and messing about with camera firmware versions. The newer Eye-fi cards don't work at all: http://uncut.photojojo.com/2008/06/14/eye-fi-canon-20d-30d-40d/

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  4. Err, latest Pro X2 card working with EOS 1Ds MkIII now. Latest fireware upgraded this morning even.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Scrap the last comment - just found: http://biobug.org/index.php/2009/03/14/hacking-the-eye-fi-to-keep-your-data-home/

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  7. Yes, almost! If you are the same LAN as a server the card sends to the server. The server being your own one on a linux box avoids it sending via eye-fi themselves to get to a web site.

    I suspect they do this as it is easier to manage the upload to standard web sites like that.

    But of out and about then the card sends direct to eye-fi server not via a local server. I need to find a way to configure the card to think the eye-fi server is in fact my machine accessed over the internet. DNS hacking is one way, obviously, and with our own 3G cards (when we have L2TP) I can do that on the move. But I am hoping to find a setting in the card.

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  8. The more I look at these cards, the more I'm amazed at what they've done...

    http://www.ikontools.com/articles/eyefi-dissected

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